Pentagon's concealment of total troops in war zones under fire

With new plans to ramp up the war in Afghanistan, the military is finding it exceedingly difficult to maintain a practice that purposely doesn't count certain troops in the battle zone. | U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Justin T. Updegraff, Operation Resolute Support via AP

Caps on troop levels in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria mandated by the Obama administration have led to an elaborate Pentagon accounting system that conceals thousands of troops from the public — one that is quickly unraveling as the Trump administration prepares to send more troops to the region.

With new plans to ramp up the war in Afghanistan, the military is finding it exceedingly difficult to maintain a practice that purposely doesn't count certain troops in the battle zone that military officials insist was not designed to be misleading but many critics now assert is at best an officially sanctioned charade.

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The U.S. already has as many as 12,000 troops in Afghanistan, significantly higher than its 8,400-person cap. If President Donald Trump sends nearly 4,000 additional troops, as officials predict, the total will be nearly double the current public number. In Iraq, where the Baghdad government faces political resistance to a large American troop presence, the 5,200 troop figure the Pentagon uses in public serves as a useful fiction. In fact, more than 7,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq, according to recent reports.

And in Syria the official 503 U.S. troops mostly covers special operations units. But hundreds of other troops who support them and their local allies remain classified — including the Marine artillerymen and Army Rangers whose vehicles are frequently photographed by local journalists.

“We can deal with operational security, while still maintaining democratic accountability about how we fight wars," said Jason Dempsey, an Afghanistan veteran who is now a researcher at the Center for a New American Security. “Accurate troop level numbers are something the public absolutely deserves to know."

The discrepancy, which has come under new scrutiny amid leaks about actual troop levels, has led Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to review the policy and promise to offer more accurate official numbers. But after Trump announced this week that his administration will not talk about troop numbers, Mattis’ initiative is in doubt.

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Under the so-called Force Management Level policy, the Pentagon doesn’t count troops who are in the war zones for fewer than 120 days in the public numbers. That includes troops like construction engineers who are building a bridge or repairing an airfield, as well as the combat units like Marine artillery batteries that have deployed to Syria — even though those very Marines have been featured in glitzy official videos.

U.S. military leaders insist there was good reason for the policy.

“Sometimes journalists would say to me, ‘Aha, the military is trying to hide the numbers of troops deployed,’ but that wasn’t the reason for it,” said Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, who was U.S. the commander in Iraq and Syria from 2015-16 and is now deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command.

“It just didn’t make sense to increase the Force Management Level when you were just bringing in some engineers for a little while to build a facility and then take them out," he said.

The policy has also had practical effect on commanders in the field.

As U.S.-led forces closed in on strongholds of the Islamic State last year, the American commander of the war effort requested permission to insert a small number of attack helicopters — three or four, according to a source involved in the discussion — into northern Syria.

Under other circumstances, a request for such a small movement of forces from a top commander would have been a no-brainer. But it took an extended debate at the highest levels of the Pentagon and the White House’s National Security Council to approve it.

One crucial reason for the delay: The Obama administration had placed a cap on the number of U.S. forces that would operate in Syria. And the pilots and ground crews accompanying the Apache gunships would bust the limits.

The delay didn’t get any Americans killed or unduly affect the course of the campaign against the Islamic State, but the episode, described by the top Pentagon Middle east official at the time, Andrew Exum, highlighted the contortions the military has engaged in to comply with troop caps that the Obama administration first instituted in 2011 in Afghanistan.

Commanders’ frustrations with the policy have extended beyond glitches like the holdup with the Apaches.

Infantry brigades deploying to both Iraq and Afghanistan have long left as many as half of their personnel stateside or, more recently, in Kuwait. They then occasionally rotate small groups of extra personnel into the combat zones on a short-term basis when they are needed, which keeps them under the cap.

During Senate testimony last year, Gen. John Nicholson, the top commander in Afghanistan, described another problem. When he took command in Kabul in 2016, he said, the one U.S. aviation brigade in the country didn’t have its own mechanics. Forced to leave them behind because of the troop cap, it was instead relying on more expensive contractor mechanics — with about two contractors filling in for every missing soldier.

Nicholson brought that problem and others to Mattis’ attention soon after he became secretary of Defense, the general testified. Mattis took heed and in the months since, according to defense officials, has been pressing his subordinates to provide him with more accurate counts of American troops deployed to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

Twice in the past two weeks he has suggested that he will release those numbers publicly.

“I had to change the accounting process because we couldn’t figure out how many troops we had there,” Mattis told reporters last week, referring to “different pockets” of troops who were counted under different tallies.

Informed that only the incomplete numbers were still being released, Mattis seemed surprised and said he would provide the more accurate numbers.

But revealing the true numbers as Mattis has promised could create complications — especially in Iraq, where Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s government faces an election next year and widespread suspicion about the role of U.S. troops in the country now that Mosul has been freed from the Islamic State.

“Whenever I made a request for more forces, the first thing I would be asked by my chain of command rightly was, ‘Well, what does the prime minister think?’” recalled MacFarland, the former top commander in Baghdad. “We’d talk to other Iraqi leaders as well. And if the prime minister was amenable and we could build some consensus, generally the U.S. government would be amenable to raising the Force Management Level as well.”

“Abadi is walking several fine lines and more U.S. troops coming back to Iraq does not poll well among Iraqis,” said Ramzy Mardini, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council who follows Iraqi politics.

But there may be little reason to worry for now.

In Trump's primetime speech on Monday laying out his long-awaited plan for the war in Afghanistan, he bucked expectations by not discussing how many reinforcements he has authorized — up to 3,900 — and seemed to suggest that the lack of overall transparency on troop levels will continue.

“We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities,” Trump said in his address.

Trump’s suggestion that his administration may stop releasing troop numbers is consistent with rhetoric he used on the campaign, when he lambasted the Obama administration for talking about the impending advance into the ISIS-held city of Mosul and told opponent Hillary Clinton during a debate that she was “telling the enemy everything you want to do.”

Trump’s remarks on Monday put the brakes on the plan to start disclosing more accurate numbers, at least as far as Pentagon spokesmen are concerned.

“The president’s comments speak for themselves,” spokesman Adam Stump said Thursday. “We are still awaiting guidance on the numbers.”

But earlier in the week — the day after Trump’s speech — Mattis himself told reporters that he still planned on disclosing “the total number” of troops currently in Afghanistan, if not the number of reinforcements being sent.

In the meantime, estimates of the real troop numbers keep leaking out — including from members of Trump’s own National Security Council, suggesting that not everyone in the administration is taking the president’s “we will not talk about numbers” remark as seriously as the Pentagon press team.

In a background call with media the morning after Trump’s speech, one of his own White House subordinates acknowledged that the actual number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan exceeds 10,000.

Exum, the former Obama Pentagon official, warned that becoming less transparent, as Trump suggested in his speech, would be a step in the wrong direction.

“They’re going to have to talk about numbers with the government of Afghanistan, like we talked about numbers with the government of Iraq, and with the NATO partners, and with both the authorizing and appropriating committees on the Hill,” Exum said. “So if they’re going to do that, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t be a little more transparent with the American people.”